In magnetic recording/reproducing technology there is a tendency to increase the frequency of the information signal recorded on a medium, while also increasing the areal density of the recorded signal. This leads to a continuing effort to reduce the track width and transducing gap length of magnetic transducers, as well as their overall size. As it is commonly known, reduction of the track width increases track density per unit area of medium surface, reduction of gap length increases the upper frequency limit and thereby bit density of the signal to be recorded, and reduction of the overall size decreases head inductance. Conventional ferrite heads do not yield extremely narrow track widths or thin magnetic core laminations, because of the inherent brittleness, and consequent chipping and breaking of the ferrite material during manufacturing, handling or operation.
Conventional thin film inductive heads built by material deposition and photolithographic techniques generally have a layer of non-magnetic transducing gap material superposed between two subsequently deposited layers of magnetic pole material. The thickness of the non-magnetic layer defines the gap length. In accordance with the known method of building a thin film transducer, usually a first magnetic pole forming layer is deposited on a substrate. Then a non-magnetic transducing gap material is deposited over the first magnetic layer, followed by a second magnetic layer, which forms the second magnetic pole. A desired track width is obtained by utilizing known masking techniques during the material deposition, where the resulting track width is determined by the width of the mask, or by etching after the deposition. These conventional thin film transducers are known to demonstrate deterioration in head efficiency at very narrow track widths due to misaligned domain configurations at the pole tips. Particularly, when each of the pole tip forming layers is deposited during a different material deposition step, and therefore possibly under slightly different conditions, the resulting misaligned domain orientations will cause non-uniform magnetic properties to occur at the pole tips. In addition, the accuracy of the track width largely depends on the limitations imposed by the resolution of the mask itself and of the particular masking technique utilized. Furthermore, for transducers having very small dimensions and small tolerances, the use of photolithographic techniques is known to provide low yield.